An online notebook
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An online notebook
I wanted to seek out the experience of these companies and ask: does remote work propagate, mitigate, or change the experience of office politics? What tactics are startups using to combat office politics, and are any of them effective?
Original: https://techcrunch.com/2018/08/18/distributed-teams-are-rewriting-the-rules-of-officeless-politics/
The objective of the survey was to understand current activity across government in what might be termed new or emerging technologies that are related to digital or information technologies. Loosely defined, these are new technologies that do not currently have a critical mass, but which may have the potential to disrupt industries or generate significant savings.
Original: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/technology-innovation-in-government-survey/technology-innovation-in-government-survey
All change is system change — to say otherwise is to ignore a fundamental truth about organisations being living breathing human systems.
Original: https://medium.com/@curiouscatherinehowe/all-change-is-system-change-85ae7917a760
Authoritative, yet simplistic assertions about reuse routinely bypass past experience of just how much work it takes to make something reusable.
Original: https://medium.com/@davidcarboni/reuse-a-recipe-for-disaster-822cbb46d3c6
This was originally published as the lead article in my weekly email newsletter. If you’d like to get more of this sort of thing on a regular basis, sign up!
I’m sure folk get bored of people like me banging on about digital transformation being more than web forms, or fancy integrations with back office systems. “It’s about fundamentally redesigning your operating mode for the internet age!” I bellow. “What on earth does that actually mean?” thinks everyone to themselves.
Coming up with a digital age operating model for a service means redesigning it in the knowledge that the majority of your service users, and colleagues that deliver the service, have access to internet enabled devices. It means mapping your value chain, identifying all the components that make up a service, and removing any elements that could feasibly be replaced by networked computing capabilities.
That probably makes no sense. Think of it this way: a lot of the value add for services as they are currently delivered involves some kind of intermediary performing a role – linking people up, checking things, making decisions about things. In many (not all, of course!) cases, these days activities such as these can be done by software, connected to the internet, that users and service providers can both access, whether through the phone in their pocket or the corporate laptop on their desk (or lap).
Here’s an example. It’s a somewhat trite one, and over simplified, but has the benefit of being comprehensible. To book a cab, traditionally, one phoned the cab company (where you got the number from is another story, but not an irrelevant one), where someone took details of you and your journey, and they then got in touch with the cab drivers to find who was free and nearby, and then they made their way towards you while you hang around waiting, and hoping. Oh, and you needed to go to the cashpoint so you could pay – and might not know how much til you reach your destination.
Now, in recent times, cab companies have done stuff to reduce some of the friction in this process by enabling online bookings, booking via an app, SMS notifications of likely arrival times, and so on. All these are examples of digital efficiency, not transformation. The service remains essentially the same, and the intermediaries retain their role.
Uber, however, disrupted this by starting from scratch, assuming that everyone (passengers and drivers) have phones with internet connections, apps and GPS. Users can now log the journey they want to make on their phone, and see themselves the drivers available to them, and choose the one they want based on a number of criteria (feedback ratings for the driver, the type of car they drive, how nearby they are etc). Users also know the prices, their payments are handled online with no cash changing hands, and they can track their driver’s progress as they make their way to them. Afterwards they can rate their driver and also receive feedback on how they conduct themselves.
In this way, Uber has removed a whole section of the value chain (the cab dispatcher role) in such a way that makes the whole process both more efficient and delivers a far better user experience, because it takes as a core assumption the fact that the internet and smartphones exist.
So to apply this to a public service, first map your value chain. Identify those areas where you are just providing an intermediary role, which could be replaced by an internet enabled service, that adds little value and just slows things down. Design those roles out of the process, then assemble the tech needed to deliver the new services.
Too often transformation processes skip the value chain mapping element. This leads to fundamental misunderstandings about what benefits services actually deliver to users, and thus miss huge opportunities to improve user experiences and reducing the cost of service delivery. As I have said before, there’s no shortcut around truly understanding the service you are meant to be delivering.
Remember – you can get things like this every Monday by email if you sign up to Digital Digest.
Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash
I know that many organisations are still designed around that hierarchy but if your goal is to end up with an organisation that is less silo’d at the same time as being more collaborative, adaptive and flexible it seems sensible to look to the thinking which is designed to support a more sophisticated view of decision making then that of a hierarchy where things get rolled up and then down the hill to get an decision.
Original: http://www.curiouscatherine.info/2018/08/16/full-stack-decision-making/
Marrying agile habits with traditional local government governance is easier said than done. If we’re not careful, bringing in agile can add another layer of governance, where stand-ups become daily team meetings and show and tells become programme boards and vice versa. It can lead to a hell of a lot of repetition, which in turn means people engaged with traditional governance have short shrift for agile.
Original: https://blog.wearefuturegov.com/from-stand-ups-to-scrutiny-25af61af5bf6
Low-code development platforms are emerging as a key strategy to accelerate app delivery to support digital business transformation. And they have the potential to make software development as much as 10 times faster than traditional methods.
Original: https://go.forrester.com/blogs/why-you-need-to-know-about-low-code-even-if-youre-not-responsible-for-software-delivery/
Original: https://www.itwriting.com/blog/11019-gartner-on-mobile-app-development-platforms-kony-mendix-microsoft-oracle-and-outsystems-the-winners.html
Today, the picture is very different. Socitm policy advocates ‘smart sourcing’ as critical for successful ICT delivery – more aligned with common sense than past Whitehall policies. This is particularly important today, with cloud models offering more flexibility in scale and cost than traditional ICT outsourcing.
Original: https://blog.socitm.net/2018/07/06/outsourcing-the-socitm-view/
Having lots of features is one thing, winning adoption is another. Microsoft lacked a unifying piece that would integrate these various elements into a form that users could easily embrace. Teams is that piece. Introduced in March 2017, I initially thought there was nothing much to it: just a new user interface for existing features like SharePoint sites and Office 365/Exchange groups, with yet another business messaging service alongside Skype for Business and Yammer.
Original: https://www.itwriting.com/blog/10883-on-microsoft-teams-in-office-365-and-why-we-prefer-walled-gardens-to-the-internet-jungle.html
But the real answer to the question depends on how IT is defined. If narrow definition is used and IT is taken to mean nothing more than base infrastructure, then Carr’s viewpoint remains correct. If, however, the definition of IT encompasses the entirety of an organization’s technology portfolio and strategy, however, the assertion that IT doesn’t matter could not be less accurate today.
Original: https://redmonk.com/sogrady/2018/06/29/it-matters-again/
They’re part of “working in the open”, sure. Showing what you’re doing, and that you haven’t (yet?) replaced everyone by robots. But corporate blogs that are consistently a good read, and not done by a tiny start up, are not “open”. At least not in the way we normally think of “openness”, as a synonym for unmediated.
Original: https://medium.com/@fitzsimple/professional-blogs-are-a-lot-like-reality-tv-96c405589c9b
Writing great APIs demands we use a range of techniques to improve the way we write code. Pair programming, test-driven development and coding in the open are all important attributes of writing great code and therefore making our APIs reusable outside Hackney.
Original: https://blogs.hackney.gov.uk/hackit/Developing-our-API-strategy
There should be a situation where outsourcing in the public sector can be managed appropriately and used to complement in-house service delivery and policy-making.
The problem is that such a balance demands in-house skills – and we outsourced all of them!
Original: https://government.diginomica.com/2018/06/26/outsourcing_liddington_government/#.WzuS0AW5WUQ.twitter
The Anchorage payroll project, now in its seventh year and with costs ballooning from a projected $10 million to over $80 million provides a solid example of how to guarantee an enterprise project failure.
Original: https://diginomica.com/2018/06/27/how-to-guarantee-an-enterprise-project-failure-the-anchorage-payroll-example/
We need to prepare for a world where people might not access GOV.UK through their computer or smartphone, but could be using Alexa, Google Assistant or some technology that hasn’t even been created yet. We need to make GOV.UK understandable by humans and machines.
Original: https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2018/06/27/building-the-gov-uk-of-the-future/
This was originally published as the lead article in my weekly email newsletter. If you’d like to get more of this sort of thing on a regular basis, sign up!
Most of the stories about what organisations are doing on digital transformation tend to get published in the form of case studies, and most of those case studies are written and published by vendors of either technology products or services.
That’s fine, but I do tend to get slightly grumpy with them as they focus so much on the purchase of the technology and what it might deliver in terms of better and cheaper services. “Council X to save £300m by investing in the Norpita customer experience platform” – that sort of thing.
Partly the issue is the jumping ahead nature – none of those savings have been realised yet, no software implemented, no services redesigned. All that’s happened is that a purchase order has been approved.
But mostly, it’s because it leaves the impression that the technology is the panacea, that buying the tools delivers the outcomes. Also that this is a quick process, which it isn’t.
First, implementing new systems is hard and takes much longer than anybody cares to admit. Second, the real benefits can only come when radically redesigning the way a service runs, and that takes even longer – particularly as you’ll likely need several stabs at it. Thirdly, those much trumpeted savings? Don’t forget where they are coming from, which is mostly what the organisation spends on people. That means restructures, which will mean more time, and more pain.
This isn’t a reason not to do this stuff – of course not! But sometimes it’s easy to get stuck into the mindset that if we just buy this thing, everything will be ok. You might need to buy that thing to ensure everything’s ok, but you’ll also have a do a load of other stuff, which the case studies never seem to mention.
Remember – you can get things like this every Monday by email if you sign up to Digital Digest.
Doing things better is hard because it presupposes you know what you are doing and why you are doing it. You have to understand and be clear on your goals and your vision, and the outcomes you want your projects, programmes and organisation to meet. And you have to have the trust and explicit support of everyone around you.
Original: https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2018/06/21/what-makes-someone-a-good-digital-leader/
It’s time to reconsider the SaaS model in a modern context, integrating developments of the last nearly two decades so that enterprise software can reach its full potential. More specifically, we need to consider the impact of IaaS and “cloud-native computing” on enterprise software, and how they’re blurring the lines between SaaS and on-premises applications. As the world around enterprise software shifts and the tools for building it advance, do we really need such stark distinctions about what can run where?
Original: https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/17/after-twenty-years-of-salesforce-what-marc-benioff-got-right-and-wrong-about-the-cloud/